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Dying for your group, or for your ideas? On the power of belief

ABSTRACT: Whitehouse’s theory offers
one plausible pathway towards extreme self-sacrifice, but it fails to explain
sacrificial acts that are inspired by heartfelt ideological beliefs, including
jihadi terrorism and mass suicide in cults. If he wants to offer a “single
overarching theory” of self-sacrifice, he will need to take seriously the power
of belief.

Good scientific theories have to make
risky predictions. In his target article, Harvey Whitehouse shows an admirable willingness to
‘sacrifice’ his theory on the altar of empirical evidence, helpfully laying out
two ways in which it can be falsified. I will argue for what he calls the
“somewhat less disastrous” scenario: a reduction in explanatory scope. His
theory of “identity fusion” offers one plausible pathway towards extreme
self-sacrifice, but it fails to account for the most important case on which he
brings his theory to bear, namely jihadi suicide terrorism.

According to Whitehouse, extreme
self-sacrifice is motivated by “identity fusion”, in which people form such
strong bonds with their groups that they become willing to lay down their lives
for them. But how does this theory account for mass suicides, in which the whole group perishes? In 1997, the
leader of Heaven’s Gate cult, Marshall Applewhite, persuaded 38 of his followers
to commit collective suicide. After the destruction of their physical bodies, so
these people believed, their souls would board a spacecraft trailing comet
Hale–Bopp. In another example, on November 18, 1978, a total of 918 members of
the People’s Temple in Jonestown, including cult leader Jim Jones himself,
poisoned themselves in an act of “revolutionary suicide”.

In a heroic act on the battlefield,
one soldier might jump on a grenade so that his comrades may be saved, but this
logic breaks down for mass suicides. What is the point of sacrificing yourself
for the sake of the group, when the objective of the mission is for the whole
group to perish along with you? Can one explain the extreme self-sacrifice of
the Heaven’s Gate cult members without mentioning their professed beliefs about
the spacecraft rescue?

Many jihadi terrorist plots, such as
the 9/11 attacks, can also be seen as cases of mass suicide. The 9/11 terrorist
cells were highly cohesive and their members may well have achieved “identity
fusion”, but they were in it to die together. Perhaps Whitehouse can retort
that the hijackers also intensely loved the “brotherhood” of the Al Qaeda
organization as a whole, which is certainly true. But as he himself writes,
bonds with larger group categories are weaker than “local fusion” between
people who know each other personally. Another – somewhat opposite – problem is
the recent phenomenon of “lone wolf” attacks. These are carried out by individuals
who typically pledge allegiance to ISIS (e.g., in a video recording) before
carrying out their suicide mission, but who have radicalized themselves online,
having had little or no contact with the organization itself (Juergensmeyer, 2005; Stern, 2009). Being
relatively isolated, how could these loners have undergone the “collective
experiences” required by Whitehouse’s theory, such as painful initiation rites?

Is it possible that jihadist terrorists
are motivated by specific ideological beliefs after all? One major incentive
for extreme self-sacrifice is the belief, professed by many jihadists, that a
martyr who dies in the righteous cause of jihad will be cleansed of all his
sins and gain direct entrance to paradise (along with 70 family members,
according to some). Strictly speaking, suicide is forbidden in Islam, but
fundamentalist scholars have developed arguments to work around this problem.
In effect, as long as the objective of the attack is to kill unbelievers, while
the death of the attacker is merely incidental, the attacks do not qualify as
‘suicide’ for these religious jurists (Cook,
2005, pp. 141-146). As Bernard Lewis summarizes the point, the “suicide
bomber is … taking a considerable risk on a theological nicety” (Lewis, 2004, p. 38). Do these theological
justifications play a role in real life? In The
Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright recounts the story Mohamed Al-Owhali, one of
the perpetrators of the 1998 US embassy bombings. Al-Owhali’s job was to force
the guard to raise the drop bar, so that the truck filled with explosives could
be driven as close as possible to the embassy. But when he threw a stun grenade
into the courtyard, attracting potential victims, he suddenly faced a theological
dilemma:

He had expected to be a martyr; his death in
the operation would assure him his immediate place in Paradise. But he realized
that his mission of setting off the stun grenade had already been accomplished.
If he were to go forward to his own certain death, that would be suicide, he
explained, not martyrdom. Damnation would be his fate, not salvation. Such is
the narrow bridge between heaven and hell. (Wright,
2006, p. 271)

Many jihadi terrorists talk about
afterlife rewards in their video testaments (Hafez,
2007; Kruglanski at al., 2009; Oliver & Steinberg, 2006), and about
of the joys and honour of martyrdom. Their
families receive gifts when the martyr’s mission is completed. Some
mothers even encourage their sons to volunteer for a suicide mission, and are
overjoyed when they succeed (Barlow, 2015).
According to Pentagon intelligence documents, the 9/11 hijackers had doused
themselves with flower water in preparation to meet the dark-eyed virgins in
paradise (Sperry, 2005). In one of his
speeches, Osama bin Laden says: “[These youths] have no intention except to
enter paradise by killing you. An infidel, and enemy of God like you, cannot be
in the same hell with his righteous executioner” (Greenberg, 2005, p. 182). During the Iran-Iraq war, thousands of
Iranian children were sent to walk through minefields to die as martyrs. They
had signed "Passports to Paradise" and were even given plastic keys
to ensure entry into heaven (Kumar, 2017, p.
170).

Hard though it may be for secular
westerners to accept, some people really believe that 72 dark-eyed virgins await
them in paradise (Boudry & Coyne, 2016a,
2016b; but see Van Leeuwen, 2014). Unfortunately, Whitehouse does not
even mention afterlife rewards, and rejects the role of belief out of hand: “willingness
to fight and die is not motivated by doctrines and ideologies, religious or
otherwise, but by a particularly intense love of the group.” But of course,
most people who intensely love their group (e.g., sports fans) don’t commit
suicide attacks. If Whitehouse wants to fulfil his ambition of offering a “single
overarching theory” of extreme self-sacrifice, he will need to take seriously
the power of belief.